The Russian Interpreter

18

Raya remained in Proctor-Gould’s room, her presence unchallenged by the hotel, the police, or anyone else. The floor clerk nodded at her when she came in and went out, the chambermaid folded her pyjamas and put them beneath the pillow. Otherwise no one remarked on her existence at all. To Proctor-Gould’s code of rules she paid not the slightest attention, coming and going from the room when she chose, arranging her belongings neatly on top of the chest of drawers and in the bathroom, and if she felt like it silently accompanying Proctor-Gould to the restaurant for dinner.

Proctor-Gould became increasingly preoccupied. In the middle of a rather difficult lunch with some officials of the Moscow public health department he leaned over to Manning and said in a low voice:

‘Bolvan.’

‘What?’

‘What does it mean? “Darling”? “Sweetheart”?’

‘It means “numbskull”.’

‘Ah.’

There was less and less for Manning to interpret between Proctor-Gould and his official contacts, more and more between him and Raya. Manning’s earnings declined; it was somehow tacitly agreed between them that it would be improper for Manning to be paid for interpreting Proctor-Gould’s dealings with his mistress. Each day Manning swore that he would have nothing more to do with them; but each time the message came he hurried round, certain that this time she was going to leave him.

They were an odd couple, and became no less odd as time went on. They quarrelled endlessly, with Manning’s assistance, chiefly about Raya’s failure to observe the regulations Proctor-Gould had laid down. Or rather, Proctor-Gould quarrelled, and she did not, like one hand clapping.

‘Will you tell her,’ Proctor-Gould would say with a curious mixture of indulgence and exasperation, ‘that when I came up after lunch today I found the bath full of underwear and stockings to soak?’

‘Tell him I’m sorry,’ Raya would reply.

‘She’s always sorry. Now, point one, she must have come back to the room in her free period, between eleven and twelve. Point two, the chambermaid must have seen those things in the bath. Now I know Raya often comes back to the room while I’m out, though she won’t admit it, and I know the chambermaid can see two pairs of high-heeled shoes in the wardrobe anyway. But it’s the principle of the thing. Can you try and make that clear to her?’

Raya would solemnly promise not to do it again.

‘She promises?’ Proctor-Gould would cry despairingly when this had been translated. ‘But she always promises. Every day she lies there on the bed and solemnly promises not to do whatever she has been doing. And every day she continues to do it just the same.’

‘I don’t see what more I can do,’ Raya would tell Manning regretfully. ‘I’ve given my solemn word of honour.’

‘I think this time he wants you to keep it.’

‘All right. I give my solemn word of honour that this time I will keep my solemn word of honour.’

It was, thought Manning, the consistent failure of his attempts to deal with her by means of reason which were visibly debilitating Proctor-Gould. He was a man who believed deeply in the reasonableness of reason.

Manning wondered whether they made love at night. They certainly shared the bed. He found it difficult to imagine them so helpless and exposed before each other. But then, thought Manning, it was difficult to imagine anybody one knew socially engaged in the sincere and serious labour of intercourse. There were less likely couples than Proctor-Gould and Raya. Not many. But some.

In spite of everything, Proctor-Gould still refused all Manning’s suggestions that Raya should move out. ‘I’m not sure that she’d go even if I told her to,’ he said – and the thought made him giggle. Manning suspected that he took a certain pleasure in being so helpless in her hands. He was proud to possess her, and proud that she was so untamed by possession, like a man who is pleased with his new car because it goes fast enough to frighten him.

Soon she went even faster. She began to steal his belongings.

At first Proctor-Gould didn’t guess it was her.

‘Paul,’ he said one afternoon, in a puzzled voice. ‘You remember that silver skyscraper Professor Kornyukov gave me at the History Faculty reception? Well, it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘It was with some other presents in the bottom of the chest of drawers. Now it’s vanished. I’ve searched the whole room. Not a sign of it.’

‘Have you reported it to the management?’

‘Not yet. Do you think I should, Paul? I mean, the situation in this room being what it is?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ask Raya what she thinks.’

Manning asked her.

‘She doesn’t think it’s really necessary to report it,’ he told Proctor-Gould.

‘Doesn’t she?’

‘No. She took it herself.’

Proctor-Gould stared at her, or at any rate at the top of her head, since she was bending over one of his shirts, sewing a button on.

‘What’s she done with it, then, Paul?’

‘She says she’s sold it.’

Raya looked up and saw Proctor-Gould frowning at her and pulling at his ear.

‘Tell him I bought the dress I’ve got on at the moment with the proceeds,’ she said to Manning. ‘The trouble with your friend Gordon is that he doesn’t notice what I’m wearing.’

‘Tell her,’ said Proctor-Gould, ‘tell her … Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure what you’d better tell her.’

Next day she stole all the other presents in the drawer.

‘Gordon couldn’t possibly have wanted all that junk, could he?’ she asked Manning, when he arrived to translate at the subsequent inquiry.

‘The people in England I was supposed to be taking it back to might have liked it,’ said Proctor-Gould heavily. ‘But seriously, Paul, what on earth is she up to? The silver skyscraper might have been worth something. But the rest of the stuff can’t have fetched more than five or six roubles together.’

The following day it became rather more serious.

‘Will you ask her if she knows anything about the whereabouts of my Nescafé?’ Proctor-Gould asked Manning, putting on his most humorously patient expression.

‘Does it really matter?’ said Manning. ‘The tin was almost empty.’

‘That tin was,’ conceded Proctor-Gould with a little ironic bow. ‘But there were five more tins in the wardrobe – enough to see me through the whole trip.’

‘They’ve gone, too?’

‘Every one. I’ve been miming sipping, then opening the wardrobe and raising my eyebrows, but all she does it fetch glasses of tea from the old woman down the corridor. Then she locks them in the wardrobe and raises her eyebrows.’

Manning put the matter to Raya.

‘Oh, the coffee powder,’ she said. ‘Yes, I found all those unwanted tins of coffee powder in the wardrobe this morning, so I took them out and sold them to a friend of mine. Coffee powder fetches a lot of money in Moscow.’

Proctor-Gould stared gloomily at the floor for a long time when Manning translated this to him, no doubt wondering how he was going to put up with Raya for the rest of his stay without Nescafé to console him. With the money from the Nescafé Raya bought a black-market copy of Dr Zhivago. Proctor-Gould’s distress must have touched her, though, for she stole a volume of Nekrasov he had been given by the Art Literature Publishing House and bought back one of the tins of Nescafé, which she gave to him and made up whenever he wanted.

‘It’s got to stop,’ he told Manning, sipping at a cup which Raya had brought him unbidden. ‘I’m not joking, Paul. It can’t go on.’

He looked nervous. How Raya looked Manning could not tell. She was lying on her stomach on the bed, reading Dr Zhivago, her hair hanging down around the book like a curtain.

‘I suppose it’s intended as a practical joke, is it?’ demanded Proctor-Gould. ‘The Slavonic sense of humour?’

‘I don’t know, I’m afraid,’ said Manning.

‘I thought you were the great expert on the Slavonic temperament?’

‘I thought you were?’

‘I don’t understand the first thing about these people,’ said Proctor-Gould morosely.

It was the first time that Manning had seen him really depressed.